Research and development on automatic information organization and subject analysis in recent decades

Information organization and subject analysis (IOSA) is an important issue in the field of library and information science (LIS). As the fast advance in information technology, more and more digital documents are emerging in a pace such that automated IOSA become inevitable. This article firstly introduces the development of related automatic techniques in recent decades and promotes a tranditional viewpoint based on the workflow of: (1) data collection and aggregation, (2) cataloguing, (3) regulation, (4) archving, and (5) usage, to regulate the whole process when applying automated techniques to any IOSA task. Some application examples are then described to let the readers have a feel of the feasibility of these techniques; specifically the applications of keyword extraction, association analysis, document clustering, and topic categorization are mentioned. We conclude that the related techniques and applications are still developing in a quick pace such that only a few percentages of them can be mentioned. This article is intended to promote the mutual cooperation among the LIS and other fields.